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Sugar cane was brought to Cuba by Columbus who discovered the island on his first voyage to the Americas in 1492. The cane, which had originally come to Spain from China, grew far better in Cuba's tropical climate. It soon became the island's main crop, making the Cuban planters very rich - and arousing the interest of American sugar planters in the Southern States, leading ultimately to US intervention in the Cuban war of independence from Spain
The early Spanish colonists extracted sugar from the cane by crushing the stalk and cooking the juice with a little lime to precipitate impurities.
The resulting heavy, black liquid was then poured into clay pots where the sugar slowly crystallised, leaving a dark juice to drain off through a hole in the bottom. Pretty soon they worked out that these molasses could be fermented with water and yeast to produce alcohol, which was boiled off and collected in a still No-one is quite sure of the origin of the word 'rum' - ron in Spanish. 'Rumbullion', originally a Devonshire term for a great tumult, was already in use as a description for this cane spirit by the late seventeenth century. 'Rummage', an English word for a ship's hold, is another possible candidate. The Latin for sugar is 'Saccharum'
In 1830 a Spanish wine merchant emigrated from Catalonia to the city of Santiago in the far west of Cuba. His name: Don Facundo Bacardi y Maso. Bacardi tried something totally new - filtering rum through charcoal to remove impurities and then ageing the purified spirit in oak barrels. Bacardi found that this produced a mellow, highly refined rum In 1862, Bacardi y Compania was established and set the standards for the new light spirit which quickly became popular in cocktails. The roof of Bacardi's distillery was infested with bats, so Don Facundo's wife adopted the animal as Bacardi's now famous lucky symbol During the 1920s, Prohibition in the United States breathed even more alcoholic life into the Cuban rum industry as Americans sloshed into Cuba in search of legal refreshment. Cuba was by then independent of Spain, but under very strong US influence After the revolution in 1959, the company's Cuban assets were seized by the state and Bacardi's great grandson and head of the company fled the island with his secretary - leaving Mrs. Bacardi behind, but taking with him the rights to the Bacardi name The Cuban government switched its rum strategy to the Havana Club name, founded in 1878 by another rum family, the Arechabalas, who had also fled the Revolution. Havana Club became the main Cuban export brand - and the Cuban government and Bacardi company embarked on a war of words and legal actions against one another  At Cubana we do offer Havana Club and Bacardi - both make excellent rums in the Cuban tradition. However, our main pouring rum is a very special Cuban rum which we have found in tastings to be superior to both - Ron Caney and which is distilled in the far-south east of Cuba in the heart of the island's sugar and rum belt. Ron Caney also recently won the blind-taste tests in Havana
Ron Caney has only recently become available and Cubana is the launch bar for the rum. The quality of Caney Carta Blanca rum, which we use in most of our cocktails, is excellent and we also stock Caney Oro and Caney Centuria Especial Anejo rum |
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